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Research Assistant, Mustard breeding
2023-05-18
Dear Amanda Leblanc,
Please accept my application for the position of Research Assistant, Mustard breeding. I am excited to be considered for this role and believe I would be a good candidate. I have a BSc in Biology from the University of Regina, a MSc in Agrobiotechnology from Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (University of Giessen) and have spent the last 6+ years at the University of Saskatchewan as a Research Assistant in the pulse crop breeding & genetics group working with lentils. I also have experience working with Brassica crops for my MSc and during an internship I did with Cargil.
For the last 6+ years I have been in charge of field trials for various lentil populations including a diversity panel, a nested association panel and numerous inter-specific RIL populations. My duties included planning of the field trial set-up, seed preparation, phenotyping, harvest and post-harvest processing, along with the data wrangling and analyses. I was also responsible for coordinating the import and export of seed for our international field trials.
In addition to overseeing our field trials, I have extensive experience in wrangling very large data sets and performing complex statistical procedures such as GWAS and QTL analyses. I am very comfortable working in and have a passion for data visualization. My most recent work involved utilizing UAV imagery to model growth curves for a lentil diversity panel across multi-environment trials and perform GWAS on novel traits derived from the analysis.
I am confident my knowledge and experience in plant breeding and research will make me a good fit for this position. Thank you for your consideration, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Derek Michael Wright
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